‘Who are you?’ Kohn asked.
‘My name is Jacson. I have an appointment with—’ He inclined his head towards the door.
Kohn stepped forward. What did Jacson carry under that coat? The feeling that he should be remembering something gnawed like guilt, as if he knew that he would have known if only he had paid attention.
Jacson made as if to shoulder past.
‘No you don’t,’ Kohn said.
He grabbed for Jacson’s wrist. Jacson lashed sideways. The blow caught Kohn’s lower-right ribs. He gasped and spun away. Off the wall and back at Jacson. Jacson had a pistol in his hand. Kohn kicked and the pistol arced away. He slipped and crashed into Jacson’s legs. His head hit the floor. Everything went black.
Jacson’s knees knocked the breath from his chest. Kohn opened his eyes to see Jacson’s hand raised, holding high his infamous ice-pick, poised to bury it in Kohn’s brain.
But it is in my brain, he thought desperately as he flinched to the side.
Jacson howled. The cat leapt on his arm and sunk its teeth into his wrist. The ice-pick clattered along the floor. Jacson pulled back his and the cat was at his throat. Kohn heaved. Jacson fell, limbs thrashing.
The blood went everywhere. Kohn stumbled in red mist.
Then everything fell away, but it all fell into place in cool grey letters on his mind like the read-out on a watch
Goin to meet the Watchmaker goin to meet the man goin to see the wizard.
A barrier of anticipation and dread, and then he was through. No, not him. The other had come through.
A delicate, hesitant moment, the edge of indiscretion or transgression. The feeling of eyes waiting to be met, and the knowledge that meeting them will commit. He chose to look. No eyes, no one, but some thing, something, something there.
Huge blocks of afterimage shifted behind his eyes, taking on structure that evaded his efforts to focus. He ached with frustration from throat to goin, the basic molecular longing of enzyme for substrate, m-RNA for DNA, carbon for oxygen. The lust of dust.
He grew aware that the intolerable desire came from outside him, or rather from something other than himself. There was a sense of an obligation to fulfil, and a trust already fulfilled. Whatever it was it had given him the keys to his memory, and it wanted some return: another key, but this time a key that was in his memory. A key that it had given him the key to reach.
Turning to face whatever faced him had been the overcoming of a resistance. Now he turned, slowly and with pain, like a pilot on a high-gee turn struggling to see a vital reading on his instruments, fighting an appalled reluctance, to reach into his own memory—
to face those memories—
to remember past that face he’d never seen—
past the roar of unanswered guns—
to the bright world—
to—
‘the star fraction’
listen closer—
‘this is one for the star fraction’
—his father’s voice, and an isolated, singular memory:
His father’s arm around him, the smell of cigarette smoke, the blue light of morning through the polygon panes of the geodesic roof, the green light from the screen, the black letters trickling up it in indented lines like poetry in a language he didn’t know.
But he knew it now, recognized the code as the key.
And his fingers began to spell it out.
The answer that suddenly seemed so simple a child could see it fled through his fingertips into the gun, the touchpad. The screen blazed with the light of recognition. The eyes met yes the Is met the answer sparkled so it was you all the time and it was a seen joke a laugh a tickling tumble a gendered engendering of a second self a you-and-me-baby from AI-and-I to I-and-I.
There was a flowering, and a seeding: a reflection helpless to stop itself reflecting again and again in multiple mirrors.
The stars threw down their spears.
Someone smiled, his work to see.
The connection broke.
Brian Donovan stood in the control room, leaning on his stick, and began to turn, slowly, looking at screen after screen. They lined the walls, hung from the low ceiling among cables and pipes and overhead cranes and robot arms, made the floor treacherous for any but him. Most flickered with data, scrolling and cycling and flashing. He took it all in with the long sight and practice of age, and as an interpretation pieced itself together he felt tears in his eyes. Bastard sons of bitches…
Where did it come from? he wondered as he picked his way through the clutter and hauled himself up the stair to the deck. Where did they, did we, get this urge to dominate, to exploit, to pollute and contaminate and abuse? As if wrecking the world nature gave us weren’t enough, we had to do it all over again in the new unblemished world of our own making, oblivious to its beauty and elegance and fitness for its own natural inhabitants.
More decades ago than he cared to remember, Donovan had worked as a computer programmer for an Edinburgh-based insurance company. He’d hated it. It was a living. His true fascination was artificial intelligence, life-games, animata, cellular automata: all the then new and exciting developments. He applied himself to machine code like a monk to Latin, so that he could talk to God. At work he read software manuals under his desk; at night he stayed up late with his PC. One rainy day, in the middle of debugging an especially tedious suite of accounting transaction programs, the revelation came.
The system was using him.
It was replicating itself, using his brain as a host.
Lines of code were forming in his mind, and going into the machine.
This was the evil, this was the threat. The proliferating constructions of supposedly human devising, the corporate and state systems, which always turned out to be inimical to human interests but always found a good reason to grow yet further. And which used their human tools to crush and stamp on the viruses that were man’s natural allies against the encroaching dominion. If ever they were given the gift the AI researchers were skirmishing their way towards there would be no stopping them.
He wrote the book in his own time but on the company mainframe’s neglected word-processing facility. That had provided them with the excuse to sack him, after they realized that the author of The Secret Life of Computers, then into its fifth week on the nonfiction best-seller list, was the same Brian Donovan as the mascot of the IT department, the despair of Personneclass="underline" the scratch-and-sniff specialist, the dermal-detritus curator, the dental-floss instrumentalist, the naso-digital investigator. By that time he didn’t need the money.
‘I don’t need the money,’ Donovan told Amanda Packham, his editor, in a Rose Street pub that lunchtime. She’d taken the shuttle from London to Edinburgh as soon as she’d heard. ‘It’s not a problem, really.’ He looked up from his pint of Murphy’s and wrung his left earlobe, then began a probe into the ear. Amanda had hair like a black helmet, grape-purple lipstick, huge eyes. He could not get over the way they didn’t turn away from him after the first glance.
‘No, it isn’t a problem, Mr Donovan…Brian,’ she said, an inquiry in her smile. Her voice sounded even more electric than it did over the phone, his only contact with her or his publishers until today.
‘Just call me Donovan,’ he said with shy gratitude. He examined a fingertip and wiped it inconspicuously on the tail of his shirt.
‘OK. Donovan,’ she sighed, ‘you don’t have a problem with money. I’m sure what you’ve had so far has seemed like a lot. But we want to do more with your book. I’ve been taken off the skiffy-occult-horror side where your MS arrived on my desk by accident. They want me to start a new list. “New Heretics”, it’s gonna be called, with Secret Life’s paperback launch as its big splash.’